Mass Storage Structure

Magnetic disks provide bulk of secondary storage of modern computers

Drives rotate at 60 to 250 times per second
Transfer rate is rate at which data flow between drive and computer
Positioning time (random-access time) is time to move disk arm to
desired cylinder (seek time) and time for desired sector to rotate under
the disk head (rotational latency)
Head crash results from disk head making contact with the disk surface
-- That’s bad
Disks can be removable
Drive attached to computer via I/O bus
Busses vary, including EIDE, ATA, SATA, USB, Fibre Channel, SCSI,
SAS, Firewire
Host controller in computer uses bus to talk to disk controller built
into drive or storage array
Moving-head Disk Mechanism
 Hard Disks
Platters range from .85” to 14” (historically)
Commonly 3.5”, 2.5”, and 1.8”
Range from 30GB to 3TB per drive
Performance
Transfer Rate – theoretical – 6 Gb/sec
Effective Transfer Rate – real – 1Gb/sec
Seek time from 3ms to 12ms – 9ms
common for desktop drives
Average seek time measured or
calculated based on 1/3 of tracks
Latency based on spindle speed
 1 / (RPM / 60) = 60 / RPM
Average latency = ½ latency (From Wikipedia)
 Hard Disk Performance
Access Latency = Average access time = average seek time +
average latency
For fastest disk 3ms + 2ms = 5ms
For slow disk 9ms + 5.56ms = 14.56ms
Average I/O time = average access time + (amount to transfer /
transfer rate) + controller overhead
For example to transfer a 4KB block on a 7200 RPM disk with a 5ms
average seek time, 1Gb/sec transfer rate with a .1ms controller
overhead =
5ms + 4.17ms + 0.1ms + transfer time =
Transfer time = 4KB / 1Gb/s * 8Gb / GB * 1GB / 10242KB = 32 /
(10242) = 0.031 ms
Average I/O time for 4KB block = 9.27ms + .031ms = 9.301ms
The First Commercial Disk Drive

1956
IBM RAMDAC computer
included the IBM Model 350
disk storage system

5M (7 bit) characters
50 x 24” platters
Access time = < 1 second
 Solid-State Disks
Nonvolatile memory used like a hard drive
Many technology variations
Can be more reliable than HDDs
More expensive per MB
Maybe have shorter life span
Less capacity
But much faster
Busses can be too slow -> connect directly to PCI for example
No moving parts, so no seek time or rotational latency
 Magnetic Tape
Was early secondary-storage medium
Evolved from open spools to cartridges
Relatively permanent and holds large quantities of data
Access time slow
Random access ~1000 times slower than disk
Mainly used for backup, storage of infrequently-used data,
transfer medium between systems
Kept in spool and wound or rewound past read-write head
Once data under head, transfer rates comparable to disk
140MB/sec and greater
200GB to 1.5TB typical storage
Common technologies are LTO-{3,4,5} and T10000
 Disk Structure
Disk drives are addressed as large 1-dimensional arrays of logical
blocks, where the logical block is the smallest unit of transfer
Low-level formatting creates logical blocks on physical media
The 1-dimensional array of logical blocks is mapped into the sectors
of the disk sequentially
Sector 0 is the first sector of the first track on the outermost
cylinder
Mapping proceeds in order through that track, then the rest of
the tracks in that cylinder, and then through the rest of the
cylinders from outermost to innermost
Logical to physical address should be easy
 Except for bad sectors
 Non-constant # of sectors per track via constant angular
velocity
 Disk Attachment
Host-attached storage accessed through I/O ports talking to I/O
busses
SCSI itself is a bus, up to 16 devices on one cable, SCSI initiator
requests operation and SCSI targets perform tasks
Each target can have up to 8 logical units (disks attached to
device controller)
FC is high-speed serial architecture
Can be switched fabric with 24-bit address space – the basis of
storage area networks (SANs) in which many hosts attach to
many storage units
I/O directed to bus ID, device ID, logical unit (LUN)
 Storage Array
Can just attach disks, or arrays of disks
Storage Array has controller(s), provides features to attached
host(s)
Ports to connect hosts to array
Memory, controlling software (sometimes NVRAM, etc)
A few to thousands of disks
RAID, hot spares, hot swap (discussed later)
Shared storage -> more efficiency
Features found in some file systems
 Snaphots, clones, thin provisioning, replication,
deduplication, etc
 Storage Area Network

Common in large storage environments

Multiple hosts attached to multiple storage arrays - flexible
 Storage Area Network (Cont.)

SAN is one or more storage arrays

Connected to one or more Fibre Channel switches
Hosts also attach to the switches
Storage made available via LUN Masking from specific arrays to
specific servers
Easy to add or remove storage, add new host and allocate it
storage
Over low-latency Fibre Channel fabric
Why have separate storage networks and communications
networks?
Consider iSCSI, FCOE
 Network-Attached Storage
Network-attached storage (NAS) is storage made available over a
network rather than over a local connection (such as a bus)
Remotely attaching to file systems
NFS and CIFS are common protocols
Implemented via remote procedure calls (RPCs) between host and
storage over typically TCP or UDP on IP network
iSCSI protocol uses IP network to carry the SCSI protocol
Remotely attaching to devices (blocks)
 Disk Scheduling
The operating system is responsible for using hardware
efficiently — for the disk drives, this means having a fast access
time and disk bandwidth
Minimize seek time
Seek time  seek distance
Disk bandwidth is the total number of bytes transferred, divided
by the total time between the first request for service and the
completion of the last transfer
 Disk Scheduling (Cont.)
There are many sources of disk I/O request
OS
System processes
Users processes
I/O request includes input or output mode, disk address, memory
address, number of sectors to transfer
OS maintains queue of requests, per disk or device
Idle disk can immediately work on I/O request, busy disk means work
must queue
Optimization algorithms only make sense when a queue exists
 Disk Scheduling (Cont.)
Note that drive controllers have small buffers and can manage a
queue of I/O requests (of varying “depth”)
Several algorithms exist to schedule the servicing of disk I/O
requests
The analysis is true for one or many platters
We illustrate scheduling algorithms with a request queue (0-199)

98, 183, 37, 122, 14, 124, 65, 67

Head pointer 53
 Disk Scheduling

• Seek Time: The data may be stored on various blocks of disk. To access these
data according to the request, the disk arm moves and finds the required
block. The time taken by the arm in doing this search is known as "Seek Time".

• Rotational Latency: The required data block needs to move at a particular

position from where the read/write head can fetch the data. So, the time taken
in this movement is known as "Rotational Latency". This rotational time
should be as less as possible so, the algorithm that will take less time to rotate
will be considered a better algorithm.

• Transfer Time: When a request is made from the user side, it takes some time
to fetch these data and provide them as output. This taken time is known as
"Transfer Time".
 Disk Scheduling
• Disk Access Time: It is defined as the total time taken by all the above
processes. Disk access time = (seek time + rotational latency time + transfer
time)

• Disk Response Time: The disk processes one request at a single time. So, the
other requests wait in a queue to finish the ongoing process of request. The
average of this waiting time is called "Disk Response Time".

• Starvation: Starvation is defined as the situation in which a low-priority job

keeps waiting for a long time to be executed. The system keeps sending high-
priority jobs to the disk scheduler to execute first
 FCFS
Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

The request that comes first will be processed first and so on. The requests
coming to the disk are arranged in a proper sequence as they arrive. Since every
request is processed in this algorithm, so there is no chance of 'starvation'.
•Advantages:
• Implementation is easy.
• No chance of starvation.
•Disadvantages:
• 'Seek time' increases.
• Not so efficient.

•Example:- Queue: 98,183,37,122,14,124,65,67

•Head Start at:53
 FCFS
Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

"Seek time" will be

calculated by adding
the head
movement
differences of all the
requests:
Seek time=
(98-53)+
(183-98)+
(183-37)+(122-
37)+(122-14)
+(124-14)+(124-
65)
+(67-65)
 FCFS

Head position is at 50.

82,170,43,140,24,16,190
 FCFS

Seek time= "(82-50) + (170-82) + (170-43) +

(140-43) + (140-24) + (24-16) + (190-16) = 642
 SSTF
Shortest Seek Time First selects the request with the minimum
seek time from the current head position
SSTF scheduling is a form of SJF scheduling; may cause starvation
of some requests
Illustration shows total head movement of 236 cylinders
 SSTF
Shortest Seek Time First selects the request with the minimum
seek time from the current head position
SSTF scheduling is a form of SJF scheduling; may cause starvation
of some requests
Illustration shows total head movement of 236 cylinders
 SSTF

Head position is at 50.

 SSTF

(50-43) + (43-24) + (24-16) + (82-16) + (140-82)

+ (170-140) + (190-170) = 208
 SCAN

• The disk arm starts at one end of the disk, and moves toward the
other end, servicing requests until it gets to the other end of the
disk, where the head movement is reversed and servicing continues.
• SCAN algorithm Sometimes called the elevator algorithm
• Illustration shows total head movement of 236 cylinders
• But note that if requests are uniformly dense, largest density at
other end of disk and those wait the longest

• Example:- Queue: 98,183,37,122,14,124,65,67

• Head Start at:53
SCAN (Cont.)
 SCAN (Cont.)
A disk has 200 tracks (0-199). The request
sequence(82,170,43,140,24,16,190) is shown in the given figure and the head
position is at 50. The 'disk arm' will first move to the larger values. The 'disk
arm' will first move to the larger values.

(199-50) + (199-16) =332

 C-SCAN
• Provides a more uniform wait time than SCAN
• The head moves from one end of the disk to the other, servicing
requests as it goes
• When it reaches the other end, however, it immediately
returns to the beginning of the disk, without servicing any
requests on the return trip
• Treats the cylinders as a circular list that wraps around from the
last cylinder to the first one
• Total number of cylinders?

• Example:- Queue: 98,183,37,122,14,124,65,67

• Head Start at:53
C-SCAN (Cont.)
 C-SCAN (Cont.)

(199−50)+(199−0)+(43−0)=391
 LOOK
• The disk arm moves to the 'last request' present and services them.
• After reaching the last requests, it reverses its direction and again comes back
to the starting point.
• It goes to the end of requests.
Example a disk having 200 tracks (0-199). The request
sequence(82,170,43,140,24,16,190) are shown in the given figure and the head
position is at 50
 LOOK

(190-50) + (190-16) =314

 C-LOOK
• LOOK a version of SCAN, C-LOOK a version of C-SCAN
• Arm only goes as far as the last request in each direction, then
reverses direction immediately, without first going all the way
to the end of the disk
• Total number of cylinders?
• Queue: 98,183,37,122,14,124,65,67
• Head Start at:53
C-LOOK (Cont.)
 C-LOOK (Cont.)

(190−50)+(190−16)+(43−16)=341
 Selecting a Disk-Scheduling Algorithm
SSTF is common and has a natural appeal
SCAN and C-SCAN perform better for systems that place a heavy load on the
disk
Less starvation
Performance depends on the number and types of requests
Requests for disk service can be influenced by the file-allocation method
And metadata layout
The disk-scheduling algorithm should be written as a separate module of
the operating system, allowing it to be replaced with a different algorithm if
necessary
Either SSTF or LOOK is a reasonable choice for the default algorithm
What about rotational latency?
Difficult for OS to calculate
How does disk-based queueing effect OS queue ordering efforts?